2014 Nissan Rogue SL AWD

Partial vindication for the evil CVT.

While you weren’t paying attention, that sapling you planted matured into a mighty oak, your kids slipped out of diapers into graduation gowns almost overnight. The same thing happens to SUVs: Take your eyes off them, and they grow. Case in point, the Nissan with the swashbuckling name. Six years ago, the Rogue was born a Sentra dressed in big kids’ clothes, and it quickly became the second-bestselling badge in Nissan’s lineup. Sent back to finishing school, given a fresh body and chassis, and relocated to Nissan’s manufacturing plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, the Rogue is back to honor that golden American idiom—bigger is better.

Bulking Up

The dimensional gains are actually modest—1.5 inches of width, 1.2 inches of height, a 0.6-inch-longer wheelbase—but the result is a new Rogue that’s as large as the mid-size Nissan Pathfinder, Ford Explorer, and Jeep Grand Cherokee were a decade ago. Inflating the cabin stretches rear legroom by a whopping 2.6 inches and rear shoulder room by nearly as much, as well as allowing Nissan to squeeze in an optional third row of kid perches. The 32-cubic-foot cargo hold is 10 percent larger; with the rear seats folded, a nearly level load floor offers an awesome 70 cubic feet for Home Depot booty. To coddle soccer teams and growing families on road trips, the second-row seats recline and slide fore-and-aft nine inches, and every nook and cranny is equipped with a bottle holder, media connector, or some gadget to play with. Small gripes: Thick rear roof pillars restrict outward visibility, and the stowed side curtain airbags crowd lateral headroom for outboard second-row passengers.

The well-equipped Rogue SL we tested was armed with all-wheel drive, a double-length sunroof, and a vast arsenal of lane-keeping, blind-spot, and incoming-missile technologies, boosting the price to an ambitious $32,395. The weight gain over the first-gen Rogue we tested six years ago is a modest 160 pounds, thanks in part to a new aluminum hood and plastic hatch. That’s important because the 2.5-liter four-cylinder sitting transversely under the hood is for the most part carried over from the previous model. The acceleration we measured—0 to 60 mph in 8.9 seconds, the quarter-mile in 17.0 seconds at 83 mph—is a touch slower and reflects the new model’s less-favorable power-to-weight ratio.

No Shift, Sherlock

You can have any transmission you like in a Rogue as long as it’s a CVT. The new and improved version here belies our well-documented loathing of belt-and-pulley transmissions. Supplier JATCO, which is partly owned by Nissan, has implemented comprehensive improvements over the outgoing Rogue’s CVT.

Major reductions in friction and hydraulic losses contribute to gains in EPA gas-mileage estimates. The thirstiest AWD version tested here scored 25 mpg city, 32 highway, and 28 combined, gains of 3 to 5 mpg. Offsetting the 2014 Rogue’s significantly larger frontal area is a wealth of aerodynamic improvements that drop the drag coefficient 10 percent to a claimed 0.33.

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